What is meditation good for? and how specifically is it good for us?
Is meditation something we have to do for years and years to benefit from?
Are there good scientific studies showing specific benefits?
To the last question, of course there are! In fact if you type "meditation" into the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health PubMed site you get back over 3,500 published studies. We are going to look at just a few of these studies.
Meditation is associated with preserved telomere length:
Telomeres are stretches of DNA that cap our chromosomes and help prevent chromosomal deterioration. Telomeres shorten and whither with age, when they get too short, our cells can no longer divide; and they become inactive or "senescent" or they die. This shortening process is associated with aging, cancer, and a higher risk of death. So telomeres also have been compared with a bomb fuse, and we want that fuse as long as possible. Meditation helps keep our telomeres intact.
Meditation may improve your focus, attention, and ability to work under stress by 10X's, and may also offset the loss of cognitive ability with old age:
A study led by Katherine MacLean of the University of California suggested that during and after meditation, subjects were more able to keep focus, especially on repetitive tasks. Another study showed that even with only 20 minutes a day of mindfulness practice, students were able to improve their performance on tests of cognitive skill, in some cases doing 10 times better than the group that did not meditate. They also performed better on information-processing tasks that were designed to induce deadline stress.
In fact, there is evidence that meditators have thicker prefrontal cortex tissue and also evidence that the effect that meditation has on the brain might offset the loss of cognitive ability with old age.
Meditation improves your recall memory:
According to Catherine Kerr of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging “Meditation has been reported to enhance numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory recall”.
Meditation decreases inflammatory disorders:
A study conducted at the UW-Madison Waisman Centre indicated that the practice of meditation reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation. This anti-inflammatory affect was also demonstrated by Melissa A. Rosenkranz's study "A comparison of mindfulness-based stress reduction and an active control in modulation of neurogenic inflammation"
Meditation practice helps prevent asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease:
In a study conducted by neuroscientists of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two subject groups were exposed to different methods of stress control. One of them received meditation training, while the other received nutritional education, exercise and music therapy. The study concluded that mindfulness techniques were more effective in relieving inflammatory symptoms than other activities that promote well-being.
A study done by Barbara L. Fredrickson of the Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina points to the development of positive emotions through compassion, which build up several personal resources, including “a loving attitude towards oneself and others, and includes self-acceptance, and positive relations with others”, as well as “feeling of competence about one’s life” and includes “pathways thinking, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and ego-resilience”.
Meditation makes us smarter by increasing grey matter concentration in our brain:
Harvard neuroscientists ran an experiment where 16 people were submitted to an eight-week meditation course, using guided meditations and integrating mindfulness into everyday activities. Post trial scans showed that the grey matter concentration increased in areas of the brain involved in learning and memory, regulating emotions, sense of self, and having perspective.
Lots of studies, lots of info but lets circle back to the first question. What is meditation good for? and how specifically is it good for us?
Recapping some of the Benefits of Meditation
- Better Concentration
- More Focus
- Prevention of Cognitive Decline
- Improved Memory
- Anti-Inflammatory
- Prevention of asthma
- Prevention of Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Prevention of Inflammatory Bowel Disease
- Improvement of Social Relationships
- Increase in Grey Brain Matter
- And lots more
We can see that there are lots of proven benefits from meditation, but what about question #2 "Is meditation something we have to do for years and years to benefit from?"
Absolutely not! The great thing about most of these studies is they were done in very short durations. 8 Weeks to change the concentration of grey matter in the brain for instance!
In short the scientific evidence of meditation’s powers continues to impress. Meditation, in a way can be viewed like exercise for our brains. In Fact meditation has been shown to assist in mental health maintenance, in a very similar way to how exercise boosts our body's resilience, muscle strength, and cardiovascular health.
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